RED ALERT! Billed as the spiritual successor to Galaxy Quest, Seth MacFarlane’s new show The Orville copy/pastes the Family Guy creator’s same old jokes and adds millions in effects. Let’s get this out of the way from the start. If you’re looking for this to be something like GQ the TV show, then you will be sorely disappointed. Wait for the Amazon reboot. The Orville is less GQ and more an attempt by MacFarlane to fulfill a childhood dream of being on a Star Trek show, which is great. He even utters a line about a boyhood dream not two minutes into the first episode. More power to him. But this isn’t a Star Trek show, and so the dream should take a form with its own direction and purpose. Instead, it’s Macfarlane’s usual shtick in space.
The Orville stars Seth MacFarlane (he also wrote and created the show) as Captain Ed Mercer, a talented starship officer who falls on hard times when he finds his wife cheating on him with an alien. Cue the first dick joke. Mercer is given one last chance to command a ship of his own, the titular Orville. To make it as contrived as possible, his ex-wife (Adrianne Palicki), also an officer, is assigned as his second-in-command. In the first episode, they’re sent on a uninteresting mission which becomes a battle ground between Mercer and the antagonist aliens known as the Krill.
3. Homage Or Spoof?
Are you sending up sci-fi tropes or are you honoring them with a fresh take on it all your own? MacFarlane can’t seem to decide if he wants the show to be Spaceballs or Galaxy Quest. The former is a brilliant spoof of Star Wars, and the latter is a brilliant homage to Trek. Both are comedies, but one, the homage, also has drama while the other, the spoof, does not. Spaceballs is silly because that’s what spoofs are supposed to be. The Orville bounces between spoof and homage and doesn’t function as either.
It seems as if MacFarlane wanted to make a spoof. But he quickly realized that it wouldn’t hold up well for an hour-long TV series. Particularly one that’s supposed to run for multiple episodes and seasons. Spoofs wear out quickly, and The Orville is proof of that.
